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The Good Oil: Canned Jeep Wrangler plus more

Students with a can-do attitude put together this tasty-looking vehicle.

The Good Oil is an unashamed fan of the Jeep Wrangler (well, okay, maybe a teensy bit ashamed) and is also a known and enthusiastic consumer of canned food, so this latest effort from Jeep certainly caught our eye. It’s a Wrangler made entirely out of cans of food.

Sadly for us, this dream vehicle isn’t heading into production any time soon. This is a one-off built for charity.

To celebrate Canada Day, Jeep built the Wrangler in collaboration with Canstruction, a charity that “works to fight hunger and poverty, serve the community, and promote science, technology, engineering, and math” (there should be an ‘s’ on that, Canada!) by building stuff out of cans of food.

The Wrangler was built by a team of 12- to 18-year-old students over 12 hours from more than 4500 cans. It was later dismantled to provide more than 3000 meals to be donated to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society.

Next time they do something like this, we suggest the very worthy “Motoring Journalists Who Like Wranglers and Have a Crap Diet That Consists of Stuff That Can Be Microwaved” charity. It is administered by The Good Oil. Just an idea.

We are the world

■ Francis Lamotte built the BikeBoat by lashing a bike to a boat with the aim of crossing the 80km Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, but turned up too late in the northern summer to make the voyage. Last month Patrick Coleman teamed up on BikeBoat II for a test run across the 32km English Channel. Unfortunately the fuel tank exploded. They’re looking for $20,000 crowdfunding for BikeBoat III. Good luck with that.

■UK woman Sarah Foster, her partner and their two children stopped in a motorway layby so that she could stretch her legs and have a cigarette when she was hit by an out-of-control Mini Cooper. The car had hit the median barrier of the motorway doing 130km/h and spun off into the lay-by before collecting Foster. Fortunately she was packing a life-saving weapon — her 38JJ breasts. According to doctors, Foster’s breasts absorbed the impact as she hit the Mini’s windscreen and then again when she hit the road, saving her from severe injury or even possible death. She was treated for minor cuts and knee ligament damage in hospital before being released.

Volvo goes all out for babes

The luxury baby seat design takes up the entire front passenger seat.

Babies are, of course, precious and delightful things that are in no way stinky, noisy, little, wrinkled crap factories. As such, they should be given the utmost priority when designing a car.

That’s what Volvo seems to think, if its “Excellence Child Seat Concept” is to be believed.

So, the Excellence concept is apparently NOT some utter nonsense that a designer thought up on a smoke break, but actually an elegant and simple (snigger) solution for transporting tiny, screaming bundles of joy.

“Being able to maintain eye contact with your child from the rear seat, or being able to keep a bottle warm in the heated cup holders in the XC90 Excellence, would go a long way towards making life easier for parents taking their small child on a trip.”

The Good Oil doesn’t buy it. Even the baby in the photos doesn’t buy it. Look at his face — he knows he has unwillingly been roped into something utterly ridiculous and is, quite frankly, disgusted by it.

Either that or he’s thinking “you’re not my mother, lady ...”

Roles in reverse

Funky stuff: Some of the AH A MAY creations.

There are a number of advantages when working for a manufacturer which makes a number of different things, particularly when the respective design departments are allowed to swap around, just to do something different.

While this may be a bit disappointing for the car designers at Mitsubishi (heat pumps? sigh ... ) the blondes who design the bikes at Yamaha lucked out when they swapped with the musical instrument designers for the AH A MAY Project (Get it? It’s Yamaha backwards). They also proved that they could design some pretty damn brilliant instruments.

The bike team came up with this fantastic spherical drum set, called “Raijin” (God of Thunder in English).

The team also came up with a marimba that uses a motorcycle’s two-set configuration and quite a bit of bike exhaust tubing.

The instrument team didn’t do quite so well, with an unexcitingly straightforward electrically-assisted bicycle and a pretty decent motorbike design ruined by a bizarre and utterly impractical full-length saddle.

Formula fax

F1 bosses seem to be sending the wrong message.

There is a lot of whinging about what is wrong with Formula 1 at the moment, but The Good Oil may have uncovered the root of the problem.

The F1 “Strategy Group” met the other day and came up with measures to improve the series, with a surprising number being implemented at this year’s Belgian Grand Prix, and even more coming in 2016.

One of the most pressing measures to be implemented for next season is a new design of exhaust to be fast-tracked in order to make the cars sound less like a broken dustbuster and more like proper racing cars.

It is in that measure that we have discovered the biggest problem in F1 today. No, not the need to make the cars sound better, but in the paragraph of the press release that stated — “Following the Austrian GP, an overhaul of the power unit penalties has been unanimously agreed and will be submitted to the F1 Commission via an express fax vote for an adoption at the World Motorsport Council in Mexico City next week, together with changes to the exhaust system that will improve engine noise for 2016.”

That’s right. F1 is run by people who still use faxes.

Number Crunching

145 DECIBELS

The sound pressure level of a V8-powered 2013 Formula 1 car

134 DECIBELS

The sound pressure level of a V6-powered 2014 Formula 1 car

10 DECIBELS

The amount of change that sounds like a halving of loudness

180 DECIBELS

The sound pressure level at which the “death of hearing tissue” occurs

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